Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The Blender plugin
There's no doubt that both Maya and 3DS Max are superb products, but it's also true
that they carry a fairly hefty price tag. Unfortunately, Marmalade does kind of rely
on using one of these two heavyweight packages.
Admittedly, Marmalade does also ship with a converter for
Collada
, a file format
that was created to enable the interchange of 3D models between different packages.
I hesitate to recommend this approach however, as at the time of writing, the Collada
converter that ships with Marmalade is known to be a little buggy, particularly when
it comes to exporting animations.
Luckily there is a cheaper alternative. There is a 3D modeling package by the name
of Blender, which is free to download and use; however, the Blender team is always
happy to accept donations to continuously improve the product, so if you find it
useful do consider helping them out.
The Marmalade SDK does not come with support for Blender, but thankfully due to
the efforts of Benoit Muller there is a rather groovy exporter plugin that does a great
job of replacing the 3DS Max and Maya exporters.
Installing Blender and the exporter plugin
If you do not already have Blender installed, head over to the Blender website and
download a co
py. The URL is as follo
ws:
http://www.blender.org/
Installing Blender is just a case of executing the downloaded installer and following
the on-screen instructions.
With Blender installed, we now need to get hold of the exporter plugin, which can be
Export/Marmalade_Exporter
The plugin is a Python script that can be installed into Blender using the
following steps:
1. Copy the downloaded plugin file
io_export_marmalade.py
into the
Blender plugins directory. On Windows this will normally be something
like
C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.63\scripts\
addons
.
2.
Start Blender and go to
File
|
User Preferences…
.
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